|
The Greatness
of the Vedas
Jeffrey Armstrong has spent the last
30 years studying Vedanta, Yoga, Tantra and Mantra practices. For
the last 15 years he has been a corporate executive and speaker
for Fortune 500 companies. He has degrees in Psychology,
Literature and Comparative Religion. Simultaneously he’s been
practising Vedic Astrology for the last 25 years and has read
horoscopes for thousands of clients. Jeffrey travels and lectures
in Canada, USA and internationally. He can be reached in Canada
at 604-681-1099 or
vedicstars@uswest.net
THE GREATNESS OF
THE VEDAS
by
JEFFREY ARMSTRONG
Thirty years ago,
when I began my spiritual journey, I was studying English
literature, and if you study English literature you will be taught
that English and all of the romance languages of Europe can be
traced back to the Latin, and then from the Latin back to the
Greek. Modern Western history teaches us that the trail
mysteriously stops at that point in time, although it is a
well-known fact that the ancient Greeks sat at the feet of the
Egyptians and the Babylonians. So when India was discovered by
the West a few centuries ago there was a clash of cultures over
the origins of human civilisation. The West held a viewpoint of
time that ended with the Greeks whereas the East, and India in
particular, spoke of a time span of well over fifty thousand
years. The Western vision simply could not accommodate this
understanding. So they made up a story to explain away this
anomaly. When people from the West colonised India and began to
study the Indian culture, they established a chair of Sanskrit at
Oxford University called the Boden chair. The main function of
the Boden chair of Sanskrit was to translate the Bible into
Sanskrit. The people who studied Sanskrit then went to India and
occupied various ministerial posts within the British Government,
and they began to study the Vedas. As they began studying, they
discovered that Sanskrit was the mother language for both Greek
and for Latin and, in fact, for all the romance languages of
Europe. This discovery gave rise to the modern science of
Linguistics. The classification of modern languages was only made
possible by an understanding of Sanskrit.
This revelation
caused a problem because at that time India was a colony of the
British. As one of my professors used to say, “You refer to India
as the sub-continent, but could you tell me exactly what it is sub
too?” Of course, the saying was intended to imply subordinate to
Her Majesty the Queen. It was a bit of an embarrassment to run
into a culture that not only claimed that its history went back
fifty or sixty thousand years, but that it was also the basis for
your own language and literature! The British couldn’t accept
this and so the scholars of the time made up a theory, which said
that there was a group of people called the Aryans, who lived in
the Steppes of Russia, and this horseback riding people rode into
India one thousand five hundred years ago with these books called
the Vedas under their arms. Unfortunately, what they did not take
into account was the fact that the Vedas contained astronomical
calculations that went back seven thousand years! Now there is no
instance or evidence of a horseback riding culture having
observatories who watched the stars over a period of seven
thousand years. Nevertheless, Western scholars overlooked this
inconsistency and believed the theory that the Aryans came riding
into India and conquered the dark skinned Dravidians with their
superior technology and their superior wisdom.
This theory was
very similar to the one put forward by Adolph Hitler in his
promotion of the Aryan Race. He took this great term Aryan
from the Vedic culture, a term which literally means noble
people who are trying to liberate their soul from the darkness of
matter. It has nothing to do with race, has nothing to do
with culture, but it has everything to do with spiritual
aspiration, with the liberation of the atma from tamas or
darkness. Hitler took this word because he believed that Aryans
were the people who had invaded India from the North and he
thought that his ancestors came from them. No one has honoured
the fact, until very recently anyway, that Sanskrit is the
language from which all the other languages of the world evolved.
Some very
exciting things have been happening in recent years. You probably
know that the Vedas refer to three sacred rivers in India, the
Jamuna, the Ganga and the Saraswati, but if you go to India today,
you will find no Saraswati River. There is only the Jamuna and
the Ganga. Therefore, some scholars have argued that the Vedas
were just legends, stories made up by Indians to prove that their
culture was indeed fifty thousand years old. However, quite
recently, satellite photography has provided evidence of the dried
up bed of the Saraswati, meandering just like a river, many miles
away from the Ganga. Thus modern technology has proved what the
scholars of India have always proclaimed, that there was a river
but that it had dried up. Indian history relates that there was a
thriving culture all along the Saraswati River but that that
culture migrated over to the Ganga River when the river dried up
sometime between 10,000 and 7,000 BC.
So with the
discovery of the Saraswati River whole groups of archaeological
facts have now begun to fall into place. Archaeologists are
re-examining the sites of the ancient cities of India and it is
now generally accepted that there was no Aryan invasion of India.
The Aryans did not come from the foot hills of Russia simply
because they were already in India. The evidence clearly shows
that this Indian culture existed over fifteen thousand years ago
and that it was from this group of people that the great culture
of the country of Bharat, now known as India, came.
The Mahabharata,
the great Sanskrit epic of ancient India, records the history of
Bharat. Within it is the Bhagavad-Gita which describes the events
of five thousand years ago when Lord Krishna appeared and spoke to
Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra, which saw the triumph of
the Pandavas over the Kauravas, the triumph of good over evil.
That event marked the beginning of Kali Yuga. So the Sanskrit of
the Vedas refers to an era before that time and to the existence
of a pool of knowledge that has survived for thousands of years.
That is why India and Indian culture is the mother of all modern
civilisations.
You could say
that our greatest enemy is forgetfulness, because history, which
is nearly always a subjective viewpoint, erases memory and the
true story gets lost. In India, however, scholars have been
trying to maintain the story of ancient Bharat because this story,
this history, is in fact the story of God coming down to Earth.
That is what is so significant about the history of Bharat. It is
an actual record, a recollection of God coming down to Earth and
of His teaching, His Life and the display of His powers.
The Vedic
scholars understood that it is difficult for us to learn things in
this physical world. For example, we are all trapped in this room
right now and we don’t know what’s going on outside. This is a
similar situation to us living in the physical world. We live in
the physical world but our physical senses cannot see outside of
it. There are three ways of learning, of getting knowledge.
Firstly, we learn through our senses, we experience something
through one of our senses, be it sight, hearing, taste, touch or
smell. Secondly, we can make an inference as to the reality of
something, we can speculate as to what the reality might be, based
on our present knowledge. For example, we can speculate as to the
size of the sun in the sky based on our own knowledge that distant
things appear smaller than closer things, but as we draw closer to
them they become bigger. Therefore, we deduce that the sun must
be large, but if we want to know what is inside the sun, how can
we find out? If we want to know who created the sun or how the
sun was created, how can we answer such questions?
The sages and
rishis of the Vedic culture had great wisdom. They understood
that you really can’t get ultimate answers about life from your
own investigations into matter or from your own speculations. You
will never get such conclusive knowledge. They recognised that
there was a third method of getting knowledge, namely, from the
descent of knowledge by the Divine. This descent of knowledge is
sometimes called Divine testimony. It is a testimony given by the
Divine so that we may have an understanding of things that exist
beyond our sight, beyond our senses and beyond our speculation.
This Divine testimony is transmitted to us through sound, through
the vibration of the spoken word, as recorded in the Vedas. So
the Vedas are a recording of the actual words spoken by God
Himself to Brahma the Creator and to the great cosmic beings who
created the Universe. Ever since that time, these sounds have
been passed down from master to student, in a disciplinic
succession, whose sacred trust was not to alter or deviate from
the original knowledge, and to keep it as pure as the day it was
given.
The culture that
was dedicated to that sacred trust worshipped the Goddess
Saraswati and so her name was given to the river along which they
lived. That Golden Age culture worshipped Saraswati as the
Goddess of pure swath, which means truth. Saraswati
was the consort of Brahma, and so first I had better tell you a
little about of Brahma. Brahma was born from Vishnu. Now the
legend goes that Vishnu lies in a divine sleep at the bottom of
the Universe with a lake in his navel. A lotus flower grows up
out of the lake and when the flower opens Brahma and Saraswati
appear on the lotus. Brahma soon begins to ask from whence he
came, and so he climbs down the lotus saying that he is going to
find out! Well he goes as far as he can go but he still can’t
find an end to the lotus stem. So he comes back up in frustration
only to have Saraswati tell him that it doesn’t matter because she
came with a mantra and that if he chants this mantra and does a
certain meditation then he will understand why he is here. So
Brahma says a thank you to Saraswati and then sits down and chants
the mantra. When he has perfected the mantra Vishnu does indeed
come to him, shakes his hand and says “Hi, nice to meet you, I am
God, and I’m here now to tell you how to create the Universe.”
This story is very important because, you see, the Vedic vision of
life is that we are all, at all times, supported by great love and
great intelligence and that everything that we see in the physical
world has behind it that great love and great intelligence. So
the Earth is not just a rock on which we are walking around; the
Earth is Bhumi, the grandmother of us all, who gives us our
bodies, feeds us and nourishes us. She is not inanimate and
unintelligent; she is divine and beautiful, a deva, full of wisdom
and intelligence beyond our understanding. What the sages of old
recognised was that even though we are trapped by being in our
physical bodies, the one thing that we can do is to contact
Brahma, is to contact Vishnu, is to contact Bhumi, by the sound of
a mantra.
We have a
practical demonstration of this with television today. Everyone
across the country gets the same television show that is being
broadcast from the base station. So the whole world can know what
the sages have always known, that the Universe is supported by
love, by intelligence and by truth and by the good intentions of
the Creator who created it for our well being. Lord Krishna says
in the Bhagavad-Gita “In the beginning of creation I sent forth
generations of men and demi-gods, or devas, and if you do this
sacrifice to Vishnu it will give you all good things.” The
original Aryan culture recognised this. It proclaimed that we are
all atmas, we are all souls, here on this Earth to have a human
experience. The Vedas are sometimes called Sruti which
means mother. Why is this so? Because if you want to know
who you father is, you ask your mother. The authority on your
father is your mother!
So truly, the
Vedas are a whole body of knowledge given to us through sound to
help us to understand that which is beyond our perception and our
speculation. The teachers and the avatars that are sent to us
always personify the Vedas and that is why from Sai Baba’s lips
you will only hear sat, which translates as truth.
I’ve never heard Sai Baba say anything but pure sat. That is how
you tell a true guru. They embody their teachings. They teach by
their example. Within our own heart, each one of us has
Paramatma, the supreme atma or soul, which is God,
present. So when someone honours us or praises us they are in
fact honouring and praising the Paramatma within us. If you look
into someone’s eyes, you are looking into their heart, because the
eyes are the window of the heart, and so you are seeing the deity
within the heart, which is Paramatma. So when I look into your
eyes I’m having the honour of looking into your heart and of
seeing the aspect of the deity that is dwelling there. I have the
privilege of seeing a divine vision. You are giving me darshan of
your Paramatma. So everyone should tend the deity in his or her
heart very carefully. This, of course, is what Sai Baba is
teaching.
When you chant
the mantras of the Vedas your body resonates to the sound and an
important process takes place. You’ve probably heard many people
say that meditation is simply a means of emptying the mind of self
and, in one sense, this is true, especially if your mind is full
of garbage and bad thoughts. However, the Vedas have another
viewpoint on this. Let me give you an analogy to show you. If
there is some ink (bad thoughts) in a glass and you want to get
the ink out of the glass, there are two methods of doing this.
The first one is simply by tipping the glass and by shaking the
ink out. Inevitably, though, some ink will cling to the glass and
will not come out. This analogy applies to people who are living
in a busy material world and who are probably creating fresh
garbage as fast as they get rid of the old. It’s not very easy to
empty your being of garbage. The other way, the way of the Vedas,
is to fill the glass with milk, because ink floats on milk. If
you fill the glass with milk, the ink will float to the surface
and then it will flow out of the glass leaving the glass full of
milk.
You’ve probably
heard the Sanskrit word paramahamsa, which literally means
supreme swan. The swan is a symbol of purity.
Incidentally, the Goddess Saraswati rides on a swan. The swan is
also a symbol of So Hum, the basic mantra of the breath,
the incoming (So) and the outgoing (Hum). When you
reverse the mantra, it is hamsa which means swan.
Saraswati is the Goddess of speech. She wears a white sari which
she keeps white by purity, she wears crystal beads and she rides
on a swan. Why a swan? The swan has a secret. If you pour milk
on the water, the swan can take the milk out of the water, because
there is an acid in the mouth of the swan that allows it to absorb
the milk and leave the water behind. So the swans or the
paramahamsas (the pure ones) know what is the nectar, the
milk, and are able to drink in the nectar and leave the water (the
world) behind. So by drinking in the sacred sounds of the Vedas
and sounding the mantras you are in fact filling the glass of your
being with this sacred milk, the Vedic sound vibration. This
sacred milk fills your being and displaces all of the ink, the
tamas or darkness, from your being. The real presence of the
Divine occurs when the transcendental divine sound flows through
us.
The Sanskrit
language was a gift from the Devic Realm, a gift that would last
throughout the Ages. It was a gift from the divine beings who
created the Earth to those who would live on the Earth. It is the
perfect way to ensure the perpetuation of divine truth. Sanskrit
is such a perfect language that NASA, the American space agency,
contemplated using it as a programming language. I’ll give you a
comparison so that you will understand just how perfect Sanskrit
is! Imagine that Bill Gates came out with a version of Windows
that was so good that it did not need to be upgraded for 2,500
years! He would have created a monopoly. Well Sanskrit has the
monopoly on languages, because Sanskrit is a perfect language. It
cannot be improved upon.
My teacher of
Sanskrit was raised in a Brahmin family where both his parents
spoke pure Sanskrit in the house. They were that developed. As
such, he learned a grammatical rule every day and his father would
give him eight rupees every time he learned a grammatical rule of
Sanskrit. As a matter of interest, there is a Sanskrit grammar in
India that lists 3,800 grammatical rules. My Sanskrit teacher
knew them all by heart. Now there was a time when the whole
culture of India was like this, when everyone was educated to this
standard.
A famous trial
took place when the English were governing India. Two men were
accused of being thieves. There was a witness who was a Brahmin
and at the trial, he was put on the stand to give his evidence.
However, when he was being sworn in it became self-evident that he
could not speak English, which was a problem since the trial was
being conducted in English, the two thieves who were being tried
were English and the conversation that he had overheard, when they
talked about the crime, was in English! So the judge rightly
inquired as to how he was going to give his testimony. The lawyer
for the prosecution said that although the Brahmin didn’t speak or
understand English, he had memorised their conversation! So the
Brahmin took the stand to give his testimony and he replayed their
conversation in English verbatim, exactly as he had heard it. The
two thieves were convicted of the crime. It’s on the record. So
this level of scholarship, of understanding, was prevalent amongst
the Vedic culture.
Thousands of
years later we can still resonate to these holy sounds. There are
great exponents, such as Sai Baba, of the Vedic way of life, of
the Vedic culture. We, in turn, need to support what he is doing
by becoming students of the Vedas, by imbibing the Vedic culture.
The Vedas are the milk, the nectar, that we seek. So instead of
reading other things and filling our mind with other teachings we
should dig deeply into the Vedas. It may take a little bit of
extra effort to learn the stories of the Vedas and to become a
part of them, but once they are inside you, then your heart will
be filled with sat or truth. The whole essence of the Vedic
culture is that you have to make a choice. You choose what you
will eat each day. If you eat all kinds of food that is not
vegetarian, food that is not good for you, food that is not
sacred, then your temple will become filled with all kinds of
garbage. That is your choice. If you listen to all kinds of
negative things rather than to sacred sounds, if you fill your
heart with garbage, that is your choice too. It is the same with
all of your senses. You have to discipline yourself; you have to
practise certain austerities, to do tapas. This may not be
comfortable for you, it may not be easy for you, but it is the
path that all true seekers have to walk. It is hard work to study
the Vedas, to the read the Bhagavad-Gita or the Mahabharata, to
imbibe Sai Baba’s discourses, but it is important that you do this
regularly to ensure that that sacred vibration is vibrating within
you. The great yogis realise that whatever the tongue vibrates
the ears have to listen to, that whatever the ears listen to the
mind has to think about, that whatever the mind thinks about it
will become. That is the great secret of walking the spiritual
path.
Lord Krishna, at
the end of the Bhagavad-Gita, says to Arjuna, “Arjuna have you
heard me with full attention, have you really been listening to
what I have been saying and are you now ready to act upon my
instructions?” This warning, of course, holds true if you are
listening to any holy conversation, if you are listening to Sai
Baba or to any true follower of the Vedas, to any guru. A guru
simply means he who speaks the truth, so anyone, at any moment,
can speak the truth to you and in that moment can be your guru,
and listening to the outer guru is but a preparation for listening
to the guru within you. The Paramatma is present in everyone and
so there are millions of gurus in incarnation. A guru could be
anyone on the street who, all of a sudden, speaks the truth to
you. You have to ensure, though, that your ego does not block the
truth. If you have learned how to hear and to imbibe the truth,
if your body is accustomed to a diet of the Vedas and of the
sacred sounds, so you will be able to distinguish between good and
bad sounds, just as you distinguish between good and bad food. If
food doesn’t smell or taste good, you won’t eat it. So you learn
to recognise good sound vibrations, and by controlling what you
hear you control what you speak, you control the very nature of
your being. You will find that you will only emanate sacred
sounds and people will only hear sacred sounds coming from you.
Sacred sounds are the mantras and the stories of the Vedas.
So you should
tell each other the stories of the Vedas and thus pour milk inside
your being which will cleanse you of all negativity. If you can
memorise a pop song that you hear on the radio, you can memorise a
Vedic chant. Remember the analogy of the milk displacing the
ink. “Am I filling myself with milk?” is the question that you
should all be asking yourselves. “What am I doing each day to
drink from the divine stream of truth?” is the question that you
should pose to yourselves. The analogy of the three rivers is that
they flow down from the celestial regions serving God. Nobody in
the divine realms ever forgets that they are serving God. Here in
the material realm in which we live, we tend to forget that fact.
So we must choose between remembrance and forgetfulness. The
divine sound of the Vedas will lead us back to the Source, will
make us remember.
One of my
favourite stories is of an elderly man who was sitting in the
square of a village in India, holding a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita
upside down and he was crying. The people around him were
laughing at him and were making fun of him. A yogi walked up to
the group and asked why they were making fun of the man. The
people said “Look, can’t you see, he’s pretending to read the
Bhagavad-Gita, but he’s holding the book upside down!” So the
yogi went to the man and asked, “Why are you crying? Are you
upset because they are making fun of you?” The man replied “No,
no, that doesn’t bother me at all.” The yogi said “Then why are
you crying? Is it because you can’t read the book?” The man
replied “No, you are right, I can’t read the book. I am crying
because I’m thinking about Krishna and Arjuna. I’m thinking about
Krishna, who is the supreme Lord of the Universe, and yet he
becomes Arjuna’s chariot driver.” (Now when you are the chariot
driver you sit beneath the person being pulled on the chariot, and
he puts his feet on your shoulders and pushes down hard on the
left or right shoulder to tell you which way to turn the chariot.
Naturally, you wind up with bruised shoulders.) “So Krishna, the
Lord of all, the supreme divine delight, has taken the lowly
position of chariot driver to help Arjuna and to guide him in the
battle. When I think of this sacrifice my eyes fill with tears and
I cry.” The yogi then turned to the group and said, “This man
understands the Bhagavad-Gita, even though he cannot read it.”
Every seeker must
have a guru, a guru who will lead them out of the darkness. When
you have a guru, the way to honour your guru is to become like
him. This is what Sai Baba wants, for you all to be like him.
Sathya Sai Baba’s very name is truth. Sathya or sat means truth.
When you imbibe his teachings you imbibe truth, you become truth.
When you are in the company of truth, you are having satsang.
That is what you are doing right now. It is a time when you place
all the things that you would normally talk about to one side and
concentrate on talking about the things that are good for your
atma. By doing this you ensure that no ego is present, so that
you can truly imbibe sat or truth. When you have true satsang you
are filling yourselves with sat from the reservoir of the Vedic
knowledge that has been passed down to you, through much effort
and sacrifice, by all of the sages of the past.
By following Sai
Baba you have all embarked on the path to becoming yogis, you have
become students of the Vedas. You should all have a personal
notebook in which you put down your understandings. You should
get the Mahabharata. You should get the Ramayana. You should
read about the Vedic culture and understand what lies behind the
stories of ancient Bharat. You should read Sai Baba’s
discourses. If you had been a devotee of Sai Baba for twenty or
so years and Sai Baba called you in for an interview and asked
what you had been doing in those twenty years, would you tell him
about mundane things, about your life in the community, or would
you tell him about your spiritual insights. If you could recite
to him from the Ramayana or the Mahabharata, if you could praise
him with a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita, or quote a verse in
Sanskrit, it would be like you were singing music to his ears. He
would be so happy at your diligence. He would be so delighted
that you had really placed your ego to one side, that you were no
longer thinking as an American, a Canadian or an Englishman. He
would be overjoyed that you had done it of your own free will.
If you study and
pursue sat or truth very soon you will discover that you can’t
live without it. In no time at all you will not be able to
imagine a day going by without you reading from the Bhagavad-Gita
or the Vedas or from one of Sai Baba’s books. As you listen to
Sai Baba or read his discourses, you will recognise that his
message comes straight from the Vedas. The knowledge of the Vedas
is eternal. When the Vedas live inside you, you become eternal,
the soul becomes eternal, and you become eligible to go and live
in the realm of the Devas and when you went there, you would be an
honoured guest. If you could speak the language of the Vedas, you
would become eligible to enter the court of the highest realm of
the Heavens.
Just consider
where our lives would be if we had not met Sai Baba or great yogis
like him. We would be bonded to the karma with which we were born,
to the limitations of our ancestors, to the limitations imposed on
us at birth. I would not be on this stage talking to you today,
unless I had embraced this sat, this knowledge of the Vedas and
had allowed it to pass through me. The Vedic tradition is real.
It is not a fairy story. It is history. In the beginning, Vishnu
really did speak to Brahma. The Vedic stories take us into the
deepest recesses of our heart, where truth wants to manifest. If
we allow this to happen, if we finally surrender that ego, and
enter into a proper relationship with God, then we will become
God. Though we live in darkness, we have a connection to the
light. So please, believe in the Vedas and the stories of the
Mahabharata and the Bhagavad-Gita and the truth that Sai Baba is
teaching and know that it is not just coming from him. Sai Baba
is a shining representative of truth, that is why he is Sathya,
the embodiment of the sat which has been passed down by
generations of yogis and sages who have kept the message alive.
But what are you going to do with his message? Will it fall on
deaf ears? Will you listen to it but then not go home and work
with it, become it. You should be students all of your lives,
until you can speak and act just like Sai Baba. It is by studying
the Vedas and believing in them that you will embody and speak
truth in any given situation. People will begin to hear God
speaking through you because you will only be letting that divine
sound come through. That is the essence of the Vedic culture.
Source: Ramala Centre Newsletter,
March 2000,
http://www.ramalacentre.com/newsletter03_00_02.htm
Visit Ramala Centre Website:
http://www.ramalacentre.com
"You are welcome
to reproduce any of the articles published in the newsletter,
provided you acknowledge the source." |